GE's Appliance Park Still an IT Innovator

By Mitch Betts

January 29, 2001 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - The trucks rolled up to the brand-new, ultramodern factory in Louisville, Ky., one day in January 1954. Now, 47 years later, no one seems to remember the exact date. There wasn't any hoopla: No reporters or speeches or ribbon-cuttings.

But it was the very first installation of an electronic computer at a U.S. business, and it launched the era of business data processing.

Who's On First? LEO

History books routinely describe the delivery of the Univac I to General Electric Co.'s Appliance Park in 1954 as the first installation of an electronic computer at a business.

But that "first" is only true in the U.S.

Three years earlier, a venerable British catering company—famous for its teas and cakes but with no electronics experience—had built its own computer and run the first routine office program.

The firm, J. Lyons and Co. in West London, had an intense interest in improved office-management techniques and wanted to see if the experimental computers being designed for mathematical work could be applied to the problems of business data processing.

The result was LEO, for Lyons Electronic Office, the first computer to run a payroll and the first to manage inventories, not to mention the first to calculate the most cost-effective blending time for fine, flavorful cups of tea.

The whole story of this user-driven innovation—the ultimate homegrown system—is told in the book, LEO: The Incredible Story of the World's First Business Computer (McGraw-Hill, 1998). It was written by several Lyons employees who actually worked on the project.

Even in the U.S., there were companies ahead of GE in line to get Univac computers, but the computers were never installed.

In 1948, A.C. Nielsen Co. and Prudential Insurance Co. agreed to buy Univacs from the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp., at the ludicrously low price of $150,000 each.

But when Remington Rand Inc. bought Eckert-Mauchly in 1950, it recognized the price was too low and eventually succeeded in canceling those contracts.

Until then, computers had been used at places like the U.S. Census Bureau and military sites; this one was going to run payroll and manufacturing applications at General Electric Co.'s major appliance division in Louisville.

It took several trucks to transport the machine because the Universal Automatic Computer, or Univac, weighed 30 tons and came in many pieces. The Univac I processor was the size of a 25- by 50-ft. room—technicians actually walked inside to work on it—and had more than 5,000 vacuum tubes. GE got the eighth one off the assembly line of Remington Rand Inc., a predecessor of today's Unisys Corp.

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